


Restartstuck

by Ashynarr



Series: Restartstuck [3]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - Post-Canon, Everyone's Alive (or will be anyways), Gen, Habitable Fourth Planet AU, Plenty of OCs and Historical Figures to come, Some parts of canon are ignored
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-11-19
Updated: 2016-11-19
Packaged: 2018-08-31 23:08:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,226
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8597350
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ashynarr/pseuds/Ashynarr
Summary: When players beat the Game, their homeworld is restored to them, everyone brought back to life, and their powers are weakened. However, no one's been dumb enough to finish five sessions at once before now, and the results are... interesting, to say the least.





	

That planet has a considerable but moderate atmosphere, so that the inhabitants probably enjoy a situation in many respects similar to ours.

— _William Herschel,_ The Gentleman's Magazine and Historical Chronicle _, 1784._

The present inhabitation of Minerva by a race superior to ours is very probable.

— _Camille Flammarion, French astronomer and founder of the French Astronomical Society,_ La plan—te Minerva et ses conditions d'habitabilité— _, 1892._

It is well to fetter the wings of our fancy and restrain its flights. It is quite possible we may have formed entirely erroneous ideas of what we actually see. The greenish gray patches may not be seas at all, nor the ruddy continents, solid land. Neither may the obscuring patches be clouds of vapor. Man is too quick at forming conclusions. Let him but indistinctly see a thing, or even be undecided as to whether he does actually see it and he will then and there set himself to theorizing, and build immense castles of conjecture on a foundation, of whose existence he is by no means certain.

— _Edward Emerson Barnard,_ Minerva: Her Moons and Her Heavens _, an unpublished manuscript in the Vanderbilt University Archives, 1880._

~0~0~0~ [Italy, Earth, 1610 A.D.] ~0~0~0~

There was really only one conclusion to make, looking back over all the drawings he'd made of his target. Like clockwork, two dim stars would appear and wander away, only to pause and disappear again, appearing on the other side not a week later. Back and forth the stars danced, much in the way the stars around Jupiter had, and what other conclusion could there be?

He pulled back from his telescope and stretched, feeling the ache of several hours sitting in just this position. True, the telescope had had to be moved to follow the motion of his target, but such breaks had been short and barely a respite. Perhaps some other clever fellow would soon devise special seats just for such viewing - wouldn't that be something?

Briefly his gaze returned to the grey-blue dot sitting high in the night sky, unopposed by the moon this past week - a perfect time for observations of Minerva. For so long it'd stood as a beacon of war and peace alike, growing and fading as its orbit took it away and brought it back, but only now was something new about that other world being revealed.

Moons - two of them! It was hard to say for certain how large they were, but compared to their mother planet, they seemed smaller than something the size of Earth's moon. All that was needed to find now were such objects around Mercury and Vulcan, and every planet orbiting the Sun would have their own companions.

He suddenly snorted in some private amusement - Kepler had had no way of knowing beforehand of there being two moons about Minerva, and yet had incorrectly congratulated him for their discovery - when he'd tried to alert him to the odd shape of Saturn instead! It seemed the universe did have a sense of humor after all; at this point, it wouldn't surprise him if he did find Kepler's other moons after all.

Still, there were several things to do before he set out to search for such things. One was, of course, to alert the others to his proper discovery, as well as to mention again the issue of Saturn. The other… well, the newly discovered moons did need names, and Minerva was known to be part of a triad…

Galileo huffed with a small smile, looking back up to Minerva one last time. Tinia and Uni. Yes, those would certainly do.

~0~0~0~ [Zemnar, Alterus, 563 H.R.E.] ~0~0~0~

"You're late."

Naveti Wetovs winced, clutching her small bag closer to her chest. "I'm sorry, Starvigator Dawngaze- the schoolfeeder wouldn't let any of us leave until everyone finished the exam."

His dark blue gaze did not turn away from her as he asked, "Even though I have made it clear in the past that I require your presence well before sunrise in order to get the network roused and working?"

"Yes sir," She replied. "He didn't want any psionics out of eyeshot in case they tried to pass on answers to the others."

"And the non-psionics?"

"They might ask a psionic for help in exchange for caegars or favors."

"I see." The highblood closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose. "A reasonable precaution, but I would prefer being alerted to such things in the future so I am not left waiting."

"I'm sorry, sir," Naveti ducked her head, grateful his temper was cooler than most other bluebloods she knew of. "I won't let it happen again."

Starvigator Dawngaze merely snorted, gesturing for the young brownblood to enter the building. "Just get the hive woken up so I can start gathering observation data - Ictade and Dhuwiv will be out of view by next perigee, and I want to present my paper before they appear again."

"Right away, Starvigator!" Dumping her school bag in its assigned storage cube, she rushed as quickly as she dared to the hive room, already feeling the pleasant buzz of its occupants pressing against her mind. It only took a gentle nudge to have them rousing - they'd already been half-awake in anticipation of dawn and its blooms.

As such, there were already several bees floating by the doorway when she finally reached it, settling into her hair with a hum of greeting even as she went about checking for leaks or damage in the hiveframes themselves.

Really, for a lowblooded mutant with no lusus and average psionic strength, Naveti was extremely lucky to be taken in by a highblood sponsor with need of her specific abilities. Her animal communion abilities were strong enough to work with a decently-sized hiveframe, and her wings allowed her to reach the frames that had grown up in the corners of the ceiling without the Starvigator having to pay for a professionally trained cullmuner to move them.

In exchange, she had a comfortable respiteblock and clean clothes, was fed thrice nightly, and was in a midblood-classed teaching center that she would have been hard-pressed to get into even if she were the top of her year and spectrum. And, she reminded herself as her two companions departed to join their hivemates in warming up the frames, she would not have so many friends to greet her every morning.

With a smile she bent down on a knee, carefully tapping the next frame for sounds of damage.

~0~0~0~ [Italy, Earth, 1611 A.D.] ~0~0~0~

Why was it, Kepler groused, that there was never enough time in the day to do everything that had to be done? Two letters of advice to men who already seemed intent on ignoring them anyways, his wife falling ill, the manuscript he'd been working on for months, his reply to Galileo, and finally his research notes on Minerva.

Of course, the last two were related, and to a degree the manuscript was as well - he'd already been put out when his colleague had not only discovered the twin moons of that other world, then proceeded to determine their periods to fourteen and one-third days. And that wasn't counting his measurements for Jupiter's four! Kepler was determined, once he was secure in a new job, to build the telescope design he'd drawn up and use it to get ahead, perhaps by determining the length of day of Minerva first.

He sighed, slouching back into his seat as he pinched at the bridge of his nose. The dawn of a new era of astronomy, and the world seemed set to keep him away from the night sky at all costs.

At the least, the frustration of being kept from his research was serving his creativity well - he doubted he'd be nearly as far into it as he was if he actually had the time he wanted to himself. The hardest part had been deciding what world he wanted his space traveller to go to - the Moon was tempting for its closeness and the familiarity he'd started to gleam from time with a borrowed telescope, but Minerva was wrapped in too many tempting mysteries to discount entirely.

Perhaps he could write a second script, and so cover them both? It would take quite some time, but-

"Father!"

Kepler turned to his oldest, thoughts of writing quickly dashed from his mind as worry replaced it. Even fantasy had its place, and now would not be that.

~0~0~0~ [Zemnar, Alterus, 563 H.R.E.] ~0~0~0~

Dawngaze looked up from his charts at the front door's alert chime, wondering who would be up and about at this time of evening. The sun had not quite set, casting long shadows in the starvigation block and making the custom-built fargazer gleam, which meant most sane trolls would be asleep.

The chime came again, and with some reluctance he extracted himself from his calculations, hoping the interruption would not last long enough to keep him from getting what reading he could before the hives went to sleep for the night. The alarm chimed a third time just as he reached the door, giving him the proper amount of annoyance to convey through a wordless gaze at the frazzled midblood messenger.

"Priority message for you though the Psionic Express, Starvigator - from a Starvigator Brightstar."

Brightstar? Now that was a name he hadn't heard in nearly a sweep - she was part of the Royal Starvigation Committee in the capitol, and so had probably only just gotten around to his paper. Based on the time of day of her message, he could only imagine what was so important to bother him now-

The letter nearly tore from his claws punching through the pulpsheets, and the messenger had already started backing away in reasonable concern for his own continued health. Dawngaze waved him away, absentmindedly closing the door as he read over the two lines for a third time.

_The Empress is displeased with the implications of your paper. For the sake of your standing, it has been suggested that you publicly withdraw your paper and offer an apology to the crown._

Unwritten, but easily read between the lines, was the quiet scream of _what were you thinking?_ It was one thing to imply that the world went about the sun or that other planets orbited said sun - all those were easy enough to see with math and sharp eyes. It was quite another to imply that any of those planets could harbor life, when everyone knew that their world possessed life only by the benevolence of the outer gods, living in the dark between the stars.

There really hadn't even been all that much to the idle thought at the end of his paper - merely the speculation that, if the blue color of Ictade was indeed water, then perhaps it had other things that made life possible as well. He hadn't even claimed it would have inhabitants, but apparently even the idea that there was life not under rule of the throne was blasphemous.

Dawngaze closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose. Sometimes it was difficult to tell what would draw the ire of Her Radiant Ebullience in any particular perigee, but anything that implied that not all of creation swirled around Her Exalted Self and Her Infinite Wit was safely assumed to be on there permanently. There was a reason he'd moved inland besides the drier weather.

The soft patter of feet from the tiered slope reminded him that it wasn't just his own reputation - and possibly life - in danger, and with a frown he turned to stare at his wide-eyed apprentice. True, he'd already been skirting the line of acceptable practice by looking after a mutant lowblood, but Naveti was a quick learner and efficient at her chores, and overall made his own work much easier.

The Empress would find it a great joke to rip her wings off and display them in the throne room, should she discover the youngster.

With that thought, he exhaled and shoved back his temper. "Naveti, you remember the route to the hive of Parallax, yes?"

"Sir?" She asked, eyes widening as her gaze flickered between the message and his face. Good, she was already wary, that'd keep her safe long enough to get to safety.

"Gather the hive - don't worry about the frames, those will only weigh you down - and what of your possessions you can carry, and go to her. I… am expecting visitors soon, most of whom will look… unfavorably on your condition. Tell him I will be returning to the capitol on sudden business - she knows what that means, and will make certain you are cared for until my return."

"Starvigator…" The brownblood hunched into herself, not quite willing to admit to her concerns.

"Dusk will come in the next half-hour. You have that long to be into the woods, am I clear?"

"Yes sir."

He turned away and returned to his observation block, eyes tracing over the fargazer with a nostalgic sigh. He had a strong feeling it would not survive the night.

At the least, he'd saved the more important parts of his work, and that would have to be enough.


End file.
